Alt Text: Gambling on Facebook? You Bet

Soon U.K. Facebook users will be able to gamble real money. But what if they skipped the Bingo Friendzy and just let us bet on actual Facebook occurrences? Jackpot!Image: Lore Sjöberg

Facebook will soon allow you to gamble, not just with your time, reputation or the capacity of your friends to feign interest in your daily activities, but with actual real money.

Well, in this case “you” means “people in the United Kingdom,” but really, the rest of us are just a couple uncomfortable pat-downs away from visiting England, waving at the security cameras, logging into Facebook and squandering tons of pounds on the first official Facebook gambling app, a game with the unfortunate name of Bingo Friendzy.

Facebook’s bigwigs have promised gambling won’t be available to anyone under 18, and we can trust them because of their exemplary work in making sure nobody under 13 is on Facebook in the first place. News outlets worldwide, however, are pulling out the standard “housewife victimized by casinos” boilerplate, replacing “Vegas” with “Facebook” and waiting to fill in the names and quotes.

I have to admit, I’m pretty disconnected from Facebook these days, using it mostly as a place to collect semi-automated birthday wishes and look for people to play SongPop with me. But I could see gambling bringing me back. Not bingo, of course, and nothing incorporating the word “friendzy.”

But what if gambling were deeply integrated with Facebook itself? What if I could bet on actual events within my timeline and turn my constant low-level annoyance into cash? In the same way that national elections seem almost meaningful if you have a few bucks riding on the outcome, I could actually enjoy Facebook if I could win money off it.

How to Turn Facebook Into a Gambling Hotbed

Facebook could simply post a list of odds that something will surface in a given 24-hour period and let me bet. For example:

• Results of a personality quiz that gives no insight into the poster’s personality other than “I like dumb quizzes.” — 5:4• Tagged in a photo that depicts you in a devastatingly, humiliatingly accurate manner. — 3:2• Someone posts a short, cryptic sentence that is clearly intended for maybe three of the dozens of people reading it. — 5:3• Somebody complains about something and asks you to help by also complaining about it. — 2:1• Someone apologizes for posting an image or link, then posts it anyway. — 3:1• Post by someone you have no memory of meeting, much less friending. — 3:1• Link to video you already saw in 2002 or earlier. — 4:1• Post addressed to a person or organization who will never, ever read it, such as “Dear Dow Chemical Corporation …” — 5:1• Someone asks you to help save a landmark, animal or TV show you didn’t actually know existed. — 5:1• Six or more friends link to same news article. — 6:1• Link to news article of incredible, critical importance that was published at least eight months ago. — 10:1• Invite to event on the other side of the country that you wouldn’t attend if it were next door. — 10:1• Post about death and suffering in a foreign country, right above a post about how someone needs some random trinket in some random game. — 20:1• New mother changes avatar to a picture of her baby. — 30:1• Celebrity dies, nobody mentions it. — 200:1• An entire day without the word “zombie” appearing in your news feed. — 500:1• An entire day without a picture of a cat in your news feed — 1,000:1

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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become a bookie, a budgie and a Brony.